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November 16, 2011

Re-render rendered the wrong view or had wrong thumbnail or view name. We fixed two bugs in the gallery re-render feature. These should fix the wrong view re-render issues for new and previously uploaded files.

Estimated time remaining information on progress bar. The thumbnail progress bar remaining time estimate was not showing up when the mouse was hovering on it.

Shorter view name in tooltip. When you hover on a thumbnail in the gallery the pop-up that appears now displays the short version of the view name.

Re-render email option added. In the dialog that appears when re-rendering an image it's now possible to enable/disable the email notification

Zoom sensitivity in panorama viewer. We adjusted the zoom sensitivity in the panorama viewer. There are slightly different behaviors depending on the browser used. That's expected.

TIFF panoramas display. Panoramas generated from TIFF images were not showing in the panorama viewer.

Panorama size limited. A Flash limitation in the Internet Explorer panorama viewer cannot display large panoramas. Panoramas sizes are now capped for this reason and for overall system performance control.

Renderer:

Materials with bump set to 0 rendered black. When a bump of relief map was set to 0 intensity the material was rendering black.

Index of Refraction for Generic materials not working. Generic materials had a fixed IOR of 1.5. Now we use the refraction parameter value correctly.

Better rendering timeout estimation. Some renderings were failing if they were taking longer than the estimated time. Now we allow extra time.

Reflectivity parameters (equal values) error. When Generic material reflectivity parameters were set to the same value the material was rendering incorrectly.

Revit Add-in:

Section box fix. In some cases the section box was not cutting the geometry correctly when objects were visible in other non-sectioned views. We now handle that case correctly.

August 24, 2011

I want to expand on our previous post here, focusing specifically on a SketchUp® file being imported into a Revit in-place component. You go through the process, but you are unable to override the Object Style > Imported Objects > Material.

It may not be immediately obvious in Revit, but if the SketchUp material [in use] has a texture image applied the Revit Object Style > Imported Objects > Material typically will not display. A painted solid color material should display by default from SketchUp > Revit. However a painted material using a texture image will not display in Revit:

If you run into geometry you cannot override in Revit, open the SketchUp file and check for materials in use which utilize texture images. You can save a copy of the file, and delete the materials in the file leaving only the default.

Then in Revit if you re-import the file you should be able to override materials to each layer as expected.

May 19, 2011

You have a host project containing a linked project. You copy an instance of the link and mirror it [maybe for an adjacent townhouse with a reversed floor plan]. Then in the view you turn on Graphic Display Options > Shadows > Show Ambient Shadows. You notice the mirrored link instance ambient effect appears reversed or distorted where the original appears fine.

When mirrored Revit may treat the geometry faces as they are inverted for the ambient calculation, so the results could appear different than the original.

There are 2 approaches I would recommend should you run into this behavior:

1. Temporarily Bind the Mirrored Link Instance

For scenarios where you simply need to create a presentation image or similar, I would recommend temporarily binding the mirrored link instance in the project.

Select the link instance > Bind Link. This will move the link instance into the project as a model group. This should display the ambient shadow effect as expected. Do not save the project when complete.

2. Rotate Link Instance instead of Mirroring

If you can achieve a desired result through a series of link rotations instead, I would recommend this approach. When rotated the ambient shadow calculation on the link geometry should match the original orientation link.

April 12, 2011

Revit 2012 now allows you to create appearance property set libraries, and share them as needed. I wanted to outline the process and where the associated files are created for reference:

You can create new libraries under Manage > Create New Library

Choose the location you wish to save the library file. This can include network locations if desired. This will create the library file, which has an .adsklib extension. From there you can drag property sets to the library, which will store them.

Once you create or open an existing library it will now appear on your library list.

Each library a user adds is appended to this .xml file, along with the library path.

You could technically copy and paste this .xml file between users should you wish to standardize shared libraries. If you delete the file, any libraries you added no longer appear in your list. The actual libraries [.adsklib file] still remain, only the user link to the library is gone.

If you paste in a new MaterialBrowserConfig.xml file, the libraries will immediately appear. Revit 2012 does not have to be restarted; you can simply close and reopen the materials dialog. Just make sure the Materials dialog is closed when you paste in the new .xml file, otherwise Revit will overwrite it again with the previous list.